I grew up in the Deep South, during a time when whispers from the antebellum were still faintly audible. They were passed ear to ear, generation to generation, from our ancestors to our great-grandparents, to whom we still had a physical link. Memories were longer then, and the passage of time slower.
If the antebellum whispered, the periods which followed murmured. Each period grew louder until it got to the Great Depression, which spoke in a loud, nagging voice to remind us in the modern age that times then were hard. Grandparents wiped off tin foil and folded it into neat squares to use again. They were wary and determined that the hard times which could come in an instant should not catch them off guard. Grandchildren rolled their eyes and threw away the tin foil when no one was looking. We were a generation drunk with luxury, and scornful of the fretfulness of our elders.
My great-grandmother raised five boys through those Depression years, in the backwoods of central Louisiana. She drew water from the creek, and she washed clothes there too, by hand on a rub board. Their home had an earthen floor, and the chickens were known to strut in and out of the house at will. Electricity came late to those rural regions of Rapides Parish, and most couldn’t afford to pay for it even if it could be had. She sat up nights, mending the worn spots on the boys’ coveralls by the faint light of a coal-oil lamp. I know these details which occurred long before I was born because she told me. She was the great storyteller of our family, and her tales took root in my childhood imagination, forming the solid ground which gives me the capacity to write today.
Her name was as outdated as the age from which she sprang and, to ears more attuned to 1970s progressivism, sounded like something quaint folk of the past with one foot still in the fairy-tale world would have considered appropriate for a woman: Lula-Laura. And that wasn’t the only anachronism with which she faced the contemporary world. The modest home I visited as a child had a corrugated tin roof and no air conditioning. She roasted and ground coffee beans herself, and she scooped flour for making biscuits out of a great barrel with a hand-fashioned gourd dipper. There were spittoons about the house, into which tobacco juices were spat. It was all a bit unsettling to a 1970s child mind, titillated by the endless possibilities of Star Wars and Atari, but most unsettling of all was the day I saw her sign her name.
She signed with an X, and she struggled to do even that. It was probably paperwork from the Social Security office or some similar bureaucratic necessity, but it seemed to me a moment of uncalled-for intrusion. A modern institution demanded a signature, and so this great woman from another age was forced to sit and be schooled in the mechanics of holding a pen, while she executed a wobbly scrawl under the watchful eyes of anxious family members. It pierced my child’s heart to see her so humbled, even more so when a great-uncle leaned down and whispered “Mama never learnt to read and write.”
This was as stunning to me as if he had said she’d never learned to tie her shoes, or use a fork. I was a product in the making of the great American public school system, and I took it for granted that everyone could read and write. Written language was such a part of my life it seemed one would have to go out of one’s way NOT to learn. It implied a level of stubborn or stupid obstinance which could not be excused or explained away. I could not articulate or clearly identify these thoughts in my child’s mind, but I did begin to discern a lump of cold judgment at their core and by extension, shame. I was embarrassed by my great-grandmother’s illiteracy.
It was something I never mentioned to anyone for most of my life. I could not reconcile the reality of the woman I knew with the unflattering picture I had in my mind of the illiterate masses, with their slack jaws and dim gazes. My great-grandmother’s eyes were bright, as were her intellect and wit. She lived close to the earth, and she could cultivate and preserve her own food. She knew all about plants, and all specimens thrived under her care. She could coax wild squirrels out of the trees to eat from her hand. She could look at the sky and tell you with accuracy what the weather was going to do. She understood the phases of the moon, and what it had to do with planting and harvesting.
She knew so many things we had forgotten or were beginning to forget, and yet we, the modern literate, considered ourselves superior. I see the folly in that now. I see the conceit with which we dismiss the vast majority of humanity throughout the ages who were, as a simple matter of fact, illiterate. If they were not lucky enough to have written or have been written about, they might as well have not existed.
And yet they made their mark, just as my great-grandmother, unable to write her own dear quaint name, struggled to substitute it with the mark of an X. It was a stamp which might have represented anybody at all or nobody in particular. She was just one of the illiterate masses who made their indelible mark on this country, not in the form of written verse, but by the work of their hands, the paths they forged, the homes they built, in the very flesh of their children. I am able to write of these things with clarity today because my great-grandmother made her mark on this world amongst those masses then. And now, after many years of reflection and the perspective wrought by time, I discover my heart swells with pride at the very thought.
